Since we are exploring Egypt this month with Around the World in 12 Dishes, I thought I would take us back to Egypt for a fairy tale. Since we already shared the Egyptian Cinderella, we are sharing today an Egyptian Snow White. First a few details about Egypt. Since the history of Egypt is so long and intense I will not do it justice, but this is meant to be an introduction.
The Arabic Republic of Egypt is in two continents: Africa and Asia. Egypt is the fifteenth most populous country in the world. The majority of the people live along the Nile River. The Nile River is the longest river in the world and flows to the North. The only land that is arable is found along the banks of the Nile. The rest of the land in Egypt is desert.
Egypt has the longest history of all modern states since it has been continuously inhabited since the tenth millennium BC. With the advances of the ancient civilizations to include the pyramids, the Great Sphinx, among other amazing discoveries. The Egyptians were one of the first civilizations to codify art and architecture. They also are given the invention of paper from the papyrus plant and among the first to have an written alphabet.
The official language is Modern Standard Arabic. Ninety percent of the residents of Egypt identify as Muslim and the other ten percent are a form of Christian. Islam arrived in Egypt in the 7th century. At that time Egypt emerged as the center of politics and culture in the Muslim World.
In more recent times there has been an on-going revolution. It started with protests in 2011 and continues in our current news today.
Now onto our story. We are sharing Rimonah of the Flashing Sword adapted by Eric A. Kimmel. In the Author's Note, Kimmel mentions he came upon the traditional version in Miriam's Tambourine by Howard Schwartz. He knows the tale is from North Africa and Schwartz said it came from Egypt. This story begins with a queen who is eating a pomegranate. She wishes to have a child with skin is as dark as the pomegranate, eyes as bright as its seeds and voice as sweet as the juice of the pomegranate. Soon she has a daughter with these qualities and she names her Rimonah which means pomegranate. Rimonah grows up in a loving household until her seventh birthday when her mother dies. Upon her deathbed, Rimonah's mother gives her a vial with three drops of her blood to wear around her neck. She tells her if they blood turns red and to liquid (after drying) then Rimonah is in danger. Then the mother dies. The father who vows not to remarry ever, is married before his first wife is in the grave. The new wife is a sorceress who want to increase her power by becoming queen. She used her magic to kill the first queen and to make the king not have control of his mind. She keeps her special magic tools in a tower that only she is permitted to go in. She has a magic porcelain bowl that when she fills it with water, she can ask it any question and get a truthful answer. She asks if she is the fairest of all. One day it answers that Rimonah is fairer. She gets angry and orders a servant to go kill her. The servant takes Rimonah out and pulls out his dagger, and Rimonah begs for her life. He tells her to go far away. Rimonah escapes leaving behind her cape which the huntsman uses as proof of her death. He covers it with blood of a gazelle first.
Rimonah finds a group of bedouin. Since they do not follow the rule of the king and queen she is welcomed. She learns to ride and use her sword with them. She becomes well known for her skill with the sword and dagger. One day the queen hears someone discussing Rimonah of the desert's sword skill. The queen is shocked to hear she is not dead. She goes to her bowl to check and learns that she is still alive. She uses a magic cape to dress as a bedouin prince and brings a magical scorpion necklace. It turns into a real scorpion at sunset. She leaves it at Rimonah's tent with the other suitors' gifts. Rimonah gives it to one of her friends, but notices the blood in her necklace turn red and liquid. She grabs the necklace from her friends neck as the sun sets and kills the scorpion. At this point her friends urge her to leave since she has been found.
Rimonah leaves and finds a cave with a huge stone blocking the entrance. She hides and sees its inhabitants, 40 thieves, enter using the words, "Open Sesame." She tries it and goes in.She leaves her horse in the stables and discovers a beautiful castle. She finds the forty beds and lies down for a quick rest, but falls fast asleep. The thieves find her and want to kill her, but bring her to their leader. They think she is a spy for the queen. She tells them how the queen has tried to kill her twice and they allow her to join them. They call her Rimonah of the Flashing Sword after seeing her skill. All of the thieves were honest men who were destroyed by the queen (all of their belongings taken by the queen's servants).
My Rimonah
The queen discovers that Rimonah is still alive and uses her magic to find her. This time she brings a poisonous ring. She convinces Rimonah to put it on after she rolls it under the locked castle door saying the leader of the thieves wanted her to have it. She falls to the ground instantly. However she does not die since her mother's love is protecting her. The thieves find her and put her in a glass coffin thinking she is dead. One day a prince finds his way into the cave and falls in love with the beautiful woman in the coffin. Even though she is surrounded by forty men asleep with their swords out, he opens the coffin to kiss her. The thieves wake up and threaten to kill him until they hear Rimonah's voice saying to spare him since he is the prince of her dreams. They are so happy to have Rimonah alive, but sad that she and the prince are in love. Rimonah tells the prince she will not be happy without her forty men. He agrees. As they journey to the prince's kingdom, they find a coffin in the desert and the leader of the thieves discovers it is the king. Rimonah wants to see her father once more and asks them to open it for her. She cries at her father's death and her tears awaken her father. He tells them how the queen used her magic to control him and then kill him. They decide Rimonah will not be safe with the queen alive so all of them go to kill her. When her people see them coming they abandon the queen. The queen having gotten knowledge that her end is near from the magic bowl tries to escape on her magic carpet, but leaves the bowl behind. Rimonah runs to the tower and throws the bowl at the queen. When the bowl hits the carpet and then the ground it breaks and the carpet unwinds. The queen dies. Everyone is happy. The thieves become the guards of Rimonah and her prince.
For this book I love how Rimonah is the best at the sword and becomes well known for her skill. She also does not need the men to save her as much as she can fight for herself. We made a sword, well actually a khopesh, an ancient Egyptian sword. I used the pattern from Storm the Castle. Our cardboard was a bit flimsy so we put duct tape on it. This made it a little better.
Today I am going to share some math with you. If you have read the About Me section, you know I am a former high school math teacher. With so many kids going back to school now, I thought I would introduce a few math picture books and fun math lessons each week. Since this month's theme for Around the World with 12 Dishes is Egypt I thought I would share two books involving Egypt and math first. Plus I always like to include a little history with math lessons. I did this as a teacher as well. I loved sharing stories from Theoni Pappas' Mathematical Scandals with my classes.
Some other interesting facts are that Egyptians developed a 365-day
calendar--12 months of 30 days with 5 extra days, the decimal system,
concept of zero, wrote in fractions, and the start of algebra. For
information on the calendar click here, decimal system here, zero here, fractions here, and algebra here.
Now the first book I am going to share with you is Count Your Way through Egypt by Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson. This is a simple counting picture book. It introduces the numbers in both English and Arabic. It begins with a short introduction about Egypt and its language. Then it begins to count from one to ten and for each number they show something Egyptian. One canal, two parts (cut by the Nile) and each number has an explanation to go with what it is counting.
This book is very appropriate for young children who are learning their numbers. It also could work with older children with the many hieroglyph number problems you can find on-line. Discovering Egypt has some divided by ages. University of Chicago also provides some. Deciphering hieroglyphs is equivalent to decoding a message which is taught in algebra.
The next book is Mummy Math An Adventure in Geometry by Cindy Neuschwander.This book is about two children who go to Egypt with their scientist parents to help an archeologist find the burial chamber/pharaoh in the tomb he has discovered. The kids and their dog are the first to climb into the tomb and the door closes behind them. Since the kids are stuck inside without any adults, they decide to go see if they can find the burial chamber. The sister had learned to read hieroglyphics before they left home. The clues to finding the pharaoh involve faces. At first they assume the clues mean people's faces, but then they realize they mean the faces of the solids which are pictured all over the place. They manage to find the burial chamber and an exit by following all the clues and knowing their geometry solids. Needless to say this story lends itself to lessons on the solids like a pyramid, prism, cone, sphere. It also uses words like tetrahedron and cube. Here is a worksheet with the definitions of these words. The faces of a solid are the polygons, the edges are where two faces intersect and the vertices are the points where the edges intersect. Some Worksheets Found On-Line:
Since we are focusing on Egypt, we made some pyramids. We made some out of paper. Since Hazel is only four, we used pre-made nets that I found at Activity Village.
I printed two out on cardstock and then let Hazel decorate one. I colored one brown to look like the stone in Egypt.
Then we glued them together. So I would not have to hold them while the glue dried I put rubber bands around them. This worked pretty well.
For older children, you could have them make the net or for a real challenge have them construct it with a compass and a straightedge (no measuring allowed). For more information on constructions visit Math Open Reference. Of course you could also calculate the surface area and the volume of all the solids. Math.com has the formulas easily available. You can find some worksheets here.
We also made a pyramid out of a Legos. This was a fun activity to do together with Hazel. For someone slightly older they could do it by themselves.
These three books also have other ideas for making pyramids. Some out of clay, sand clay (with recipe), instructions on drawing the net of it, etc. We are hoping to make one out of sand clay, but have not had the time yet to make the clay. Maybe you will see that in one of our Egypt posts coming later this month. For now, I hope you have enjoyed our little math lesson and exploration of Egypt.
Thank you to all of you who shared with us last week and to everyone who comes to be inspired and check out all the amazing things shared each week! This week I'm spending some time with my parents, so I have not gotten to visit everyone's yet, but I will.
For Flamingo Friday I thought I would share one of our favorite flamingo story books that we discovered at a library story time. Sylvie by Jennifer Sattler is a book about a young flamingo named Sylvie who wonders one day why flamingos are pink. When Sylvie's mother tells Sylvie the reason they are pink, Sylvie wonders if she will turn different colors if she eats different foods or different things. Sure enough she changes different colors and designs. Then her stomach doesn't feel well and she doesn't feel like Sylvie anymore. She wants to go back to being pink.
To go along with this book, we decided to make some pipe cleaner flamingos. I got this idea at Craft4Kids. We bought some extra large and puffy pipe cleaners which we used for their bodies and then used regular pipe cleaners for the neck, head, beak and feet. First we made some pink ones and Hazel got creative and put a red head on one.
To make them you need one large pink pipe cleaner and two small ones plus pieces of white and black pipe cleaners. To start fold the large one in half and then wrap one end of a small pink one around the fold to form the neck and head. Then fold the second small pink one around the large one to form the legs and feet.
To make the beak wrap the black piece around the middle of the white and then attach the white to a fold in the pink neck and then wrap the pink rest of the pink to form the head and hide the ends of the white. Next wrap the large pipe cleaner to hide both small attachments and form the body. Finally we curled the feet instead of worrying about toes. After making the pink ones, we decided to make some like Sylvie after she ate everything including a bathing suit (yuk!).
So that is our flamingo fun this Friday!! I hope you enjoyed it!!
Today I have the pleasure of review a wonderful book called Craft It Up
Around the World by Libby Abadee and Cath Armstrong. Craft it Up Around the World by Libby Abadee and Cath Armstrong is published by CICO Books at £9.99 and is available from www.rylandpeters.com. This book was sent to me by CICO Books to review here, and I have to say I am so pleased to do so. The book contains 35 craft projects from different places throughout the world. The crafts are meant for children to do, and if they are older than Hazel, they will not need much help from an adult. The authors are currently based in Sydney, Australia, but between the two of them they have lived in many parts of the world and are trying to inspire children to look at the world around them and learn more about other places. I have to say it is the perfect book to go along with our multicultural adventures between our Fairy Tales in Different Cultures, Virtual Flat Stanley and Around the World in 12 Dishes.
One of the things I really like about this book is several of the crafts use recycled materials. The first craft I want to share is this wonderful map bunting. You could focus your circles to be spots you have lived, visited or want to visit, or you can do what we did and just take any place to be included. Hazel enjoyed helping me sew these circles together into the bunting. As we did this I thought it would be neat for a birthday party with a world travel theme. Really this book would be perfect for it. Now to convince Hazel of this idea.
To make this bunting I used one of Steve's outdated Atlas books. I had planned on going to AAA for a free world map, but didn't make it there, so I asked Steve to see what he had. I figured it was even better to use a book he didn't need or want anymore. I did not have a big enough circle punch, so I traced a glass and cut the circle myself. It really took no time at all to make a pretty long bunting. Now we are going to hang it on Hazel's tree in her room.
After that we made some of the crafts to go with the countries we have already "visited" this year. We made the Easy Peasy Felt Tulips for the Netherlands. Hazel is using them as the centerpiece on her play kitchen table. Great craft for springtime.
We made the Saving for a Snowy Day for Finland. He is made from a recycled smoothie container. We will be saving him for the winter. This is a great craft for the winter.
For Spain we made Click Clack Button Castanets. Hazel hasn't tried them since the glue was drying, but I did. She will love them, and she got to pick out the scrapbook paper we used. I made them a bit smaller than the instructions called for, but I thought this would help Hazel use them. This would be a great craft for any Spanish themed lesson or party.
For France I made the "Ooh La La" Pretty Parisian Embroidery. We will hang it in Hazel's room. She probably could have helped with some of the sewing, but I made it while she was in bed. She did however help me cut the fabric for the project. Again, wouldn't this be a perfect decoration for a world travel themed party.
The final craft idea I will share is for Egypt (this month's destination for Around the World in 12 Dishes) and it is Howard's Treasure Hunt Bottle. It is a recycled jar filled with some Egyptian objects and sand. I added on it a print out of the Egyptian flag and map. We used objects from Safari Ltd. Miniature Replica Toobs. Some we had and we picked up the Ancient Egypt one the other day at Michaels with our 40% off coupon.
We also included a bird amulet and a cat statue.
So Craft It Up Around the World is a great book full of ideas for kids who are exploring the world. The book includes a picture of the country's flag and shape of the country as well as some interesting facts about the countries. There are a variety of crafts calling on different skills, so they will appeal to both boys and girls of different ages. Again Craft it Up Around the World by Libby Abadee and Cath Armstrong is published by CICO Books at £9.99 and is available from www.rylandpeters.com. You can look for more great crafts from this book as we explore the world through all of our fun adventures as well!!
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